A THOUSAND WORDS - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward's blog on pictures, plants, politics and whatever else is on his mind.

Jorge Luis Borges's Dream Tigers at the Buenos Aires Zoo

Sunday, May 08, 2016

I have a distinct memory of my sitting in my summer
whites, my uniform as a conscript in the Argentine Navy in 1966. I was sitting
on a bench of the Buenos Aires Zoo in front of the tiger cage. I was reading a
copy of Time Magazine. I remember reading the body count for that week in
Vietnam and reading how many Russian-made MiGs American Phantoms jets had shot
down.

I was there relaxing in one of my favourite places of Buenos
Aires, the tiger cage. My father had often taken me in my youth and I always
asked to see the elephants and the tigers. I did not like the lions. I thought
that dogs and lions were related while the more exciting tigers and cats were
of the same family.

It is only at a later stage of my life, one in which I seem
to read one Jorge Luís poem or story many times a week that I have come to know
that Borges, too, loved tigers and disdained lions.

Of that disdain he wrote in a 1977 poem Leones (no available
translation at hand)

A sketch of a tiger by Borges when he was 4

Leones –
Jorge Luís Borges

Ni el
esplendor del cadencioso tigre

Ni del
jaguar los signos prefijados

Ni del gato
el sigilo. De la tribu

Es el menos
felino, pero siempre

Ha
encendido los sueños de los hombres.

Leones en
el oro y en el verso,

En patios del
Islam y en evangelios,

Vastos
leones en el orbe de Hugo,

Leones de
la puerta de Micenas,

Leones que
Cartago crucifica.

En el
violento cobre de Durero

Las manos
de Sansón lo despedazan.

Es la mitad
de la secreta esfinge

Y la mitad
del grifo que en las cóncavas

Grutas
custodia el oro de la sombra.

Es uno de
los símbolos de Shakespeare.

Los hombres
lo esculpieron con montañas

Y
estamparon su forma en las banderas

Y lo
coronan rey sobre los otros.

Con sus
ojos de sombra lo vio Milton

Emergiendo
del barro el quinto día,

Desligadas
las patas delanteras

Y en alto
la cabeza extraordinaria.

Resplandece
en la rueda del Caldeo

Y las
mitologías lo prodigan.

Un animal
que se parece a un perro

But I will translate those last two damning lines:

An animal that resembles a dog

Like the prey (a hyena perhaps?) his female mate brings to
him.

While taking the subway (the subte is how Argentines call
it) in my trip to Buenos Aires a few weeks ago I stopped at the Tribunales Station
(Law Courts) on my way to visit my friend, painter Juan Manuel Sanchez in his
studio on Paraguay and Talcahuano. For years (since I can remember) one has
been able to buy not only magazines but good books in any Subte station kiosks.
This particular kiosk had a book, surrounded by a marvelous and eclectic neighbours, that immediately stood out. I chatted with
the man who ran it. He is called Carlos Perez, and yes, most appropriately he
is a lawyer.

The Subte

Since I have Jorge Luís Borges’s complete poetic output I
was slightly confused. I was familiar with the poem called El Oro de Los
Tigres. Borges had written it in East Lansing, Michigan, home of Michigan State
University where he was conducting a series of lectures.

I finally got the gist of this particular selection. The
title is not only about the colour of the Bengal Tiger but is also about yellos the
last colour that Borges was able to discern by
that year when he was going blind.

Carlos Perez at the Tribunales Subte kiosk

So, on that Tribunales Subte platform it finally hit home
that since both Borges and I had been fascinated by the Bengal Tigers of the Buenos
Aires Zoo I had to pursue the subject for a blog.

There was some confusion in my task as many told me that the
zoo was being closed and that the tigers were gone. This was not the case but
it is a fact that the zoo is going to be closed and it’s all hush-hush what the
city government is going to do with the very valuable property. I was told the
tigers (alas not yellow but very white!) were going to be moved to a town near
the resort city of Mar del Plata called Batán.

I drafted my friend Roberto Baschetti who works at the
National Library to pose for me with the Borges book. All we needed was to find
a tiger. It seems that the tiger was indeed waiting for us as he posed for the
shot.

El oro de
los tigres – Jorge Luís Borges - 1972

Hasta la
hora del ocaso amarillo

cuántas
veces habré mirado

al poderoso
tigre de Bengala

ir y venir
por el predestinado camino

detrás de
los barrotes de hierro,

sin
sospechar que eran su cárcel.

Después
vendrían otros tigres,

el tigre de
fuego de Blake;

después
vendrían otros oros,

el metal
amoroso que era Zeus,

el anillo
que cada nueve noches *

engendra
nueve anillos y éstos, nueve,

y no hay un
fin.

Con los
años fueron dejándome

los otros
hermosos colores

y ahora
sólo me quedan

la vaga
luz, la inextricable sombra

y el oro
del principio.

Oh
ponientes, oh tigres, oh fulgores

del mito y
de la épica,

oh un oro
más precioso, tu cabello

que ansían estas manos.

I will translate the first six lines. The this way that way walk of the tiger behind bars Borges wrote at least twice before and in one of the poems it was about a panther.

Hasta la
hora del ocaso amarillo

cuántas
veces habré mirado

al poderoso
tigre de Bengala

ir y venir
por el predestinado camino

detrás de
los barrotes de hierro,

sin
sospechar que eran su cárcel.

Until the hour of the yellow sunsethow many times have I looked atthe powerful Bengal Tigercome and go on that predestined waybehind the iron barswithout suspecting that they were his jail.

Perhaps Borges never returned to the zoo once the tigers were removed from their cages,

Roberto Baschetti at the Buenos Aires Zoo

There were no golden Bengal Tigers to be found. The closest were hundreds of papier mâché jaguaretés (South American jaguars) behind bars sunning themselves. Below you will find the Borges essay Dreamtigers which always had its title in English. Note how Borges depricates the South American jaguar as seen bellow!

In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger:
not the jaguar, the spotted “tiger” of the Amazonian tangles and the isles of
vegetation that float down the Paraná, but that striped, Asiatic, royal tiger,
that can only be faced by a man of war, on a castle atop an elephant. I used to
linger endlessly before one of the cages at the zoo; I judged vast
encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers. (I
still remember those illustrations: I who cannot rightly recall the brow or the
smile of a woman.) Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for
them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic
level they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and
suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion
of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.

Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild
beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with
impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or
with a touch of the dog or the bird.